Mac App Store Guidelines full text

by recoiledsnake • 16 years ago

22 20 16 years ago

GHFigs• 16 years ago

6.4 Apple and our customers place a high value on simple, refined, creative, well thought through interfaces. They take more work but are worth it. Apple sets a high bar. If your user interface is complex or less than very good it may be rejected

I can get behind this.

akadien• 16 years ago

How do you measure "complex or less than very good" user interfaces?

pat2man• 16 years ago

They have an army of Grandmas testing this stuff. If they can't use it it gets rejected.

chc2• 16 years ago

Somebody trusted to have good taste looks at them and tells you if they are complex or less than very good.

It's slightly subjective in that an experience is inherently subjective, but UX is Apple's bread and butter. People expect it to be important to them.

slantyyz• 16 years ago

I guess you won't see much enterprise software being approved.

AndrewO• 16 years ago

By "language" does 2.22 mean programming language or i18n?

Sidnicious• 16 years ago

i18n. They don't want "MyCoolApp (English)", "MyCoolApp (Spanish)", etc. pollution.

ugh• 16 years ago

i18n would seem logical. They presumably don’t want an English and a German binary, they want it all in one bundle in one as is common on Mac OS X. (I think that, e.g., Lightroom still has different binaries for different languages, which presumably means that it couldn’t be on the App Store.)

pplante2• 16 years ago

My favorite is:

11.3 "Enemies" within the context of a game cannot solely target a specific race, culture, a real government or corporation, or any other real entity

I guess my WWII game cannot just be focused on the Western Front. I will have to include the Pacific side just to get past the Apple Content Research, Approval, and Processing group.

chc2• 16 years ago

I think they mean "currently in existence." Targeting the National Socialists is probably OK because they're dead and gone. Targeting Neanderthals is probably also OK for the same reason. The basic idea appears to be that games must not be hate speech killing simulators.

aufreak32• 16 years ago

Is the mac app store going to be the only way to install apps on the mac? That'll really disappoint me.

pplante2• 16 years ago

Not in 10.7

moxiemk1• 16 years ago

Steve specifically said that it was an option for install programs.

Parallel "they could in the future" arguments could be made for any Android device manufacturer or PC manufacturer, and yet people aren't afraid of buying those. Being afraid of Apple doing this is a logical fallacy.

aufreak32• 16 years ago

Thanks. I hadn't watched the keynote.

bugsy• 16 years ago

Not in Lion 10.7. However, that could change in the future. Most likely what will happen in future versions (let's say 10.8) is apps that don't pay the apple tax will get very scary warnings about how they are potentially dangerous to the user and his computer. This is already in place where anything downloaded from the internet gets a warning the first time it is run, but this warning may get scarier.

PS I think your question was a reasonable one to ask and the contingent of participants who routinely downvote reasonable questions are not being helpful.

starkness• 16 years ago

See this for highlights from the list: http://www.tuaw.com/2010/10/20/apple-posts-guidelines-for-ma...

dunham• 16 years ago

They really need to add time-limited trials to their app stores. It's one of the great aspects of commercial mac apps, and one of the reasons I won't pay much for an iOS app (I can't judge their real value before buying).

e.g. I bought and quickly rejected 3-4 crappy rss readers before finding "Reeder". In the end it was worth it, but I really wish I could get that money back and give it to the Reeder guys.

stevenp• 16 years ago

Where I work, we rely on continuous deployment as a core part of our business. Our Mac client is updated really frequently, and I can only imagine how long we'll have to wait between releases.

While I think the App Store is an interesting prospect, the thing I worry about the most is a company's ability to be agile and deliver to customers quickly. It's already a problem on the App Store on iOS. I realize agile isn't really a part of Apple's culture, but it's a powerful approach.

Not everybody can afford to spend long product development cycles waiting to deliver value to customers like Apple does. In the real world, the money runs out at some point.

badmonkey0001• 16 years ago

Worse still, if you spend those long development cycles Apple may change the platform/APIs/terms out from under you making your long dev cycle moot. The longer your time-to-market, the greater your resource risk that Apple will make you obsolete or deny you entry.

Mac App Store Guidelines full text

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